Form has always been the phantom of design duo Formafantasma, standing still like Hamlet waiting for it to manifest. They are not afraid of form, instead, they want to know how it came to be, what cultural meanings it carries as an accessory, and what social impact it has had throughout history. In other words, in Formafantasma’s work, form is the beginning rather than the end. To quote the infamous first independent curator Harald Szeeman, in art, but even more so in design, it is attitudes that shape the final form, and Formafantasma is always looking to portray the attitudes of the past and the present: what kind of designers we are and what kind of designers we could be.
In the designers’ work, form is first and foremost the centre of an archaeological dig that may or may not bring ghosts to light. Such is the case with Casa Dentro (The Home Within), the newly inaugurated solo show that the two designers have donated to Fondazione ICA in Milan for the city’s Art Week. The exhibition, curated by Alberto Salvadori, lies on the first floor of the Fondazione, in one of the former industrial areas of old Milan. The architecture, visible from ICA’s windows, is modernist and rationalist: sober, ‘virile’, geometric, and functional. The exhibition space is surrounded by construction sites that are reshaping the city and making it largely inaccessible. But something else is happening inside. Like Hamlet surrounded by ghosts, the two designers stand still in their most personal body of work to date.
Yellow, dark purple, and green are the main colours, small blue flowers are a recurring theme, and the design pieces – a series of furniture and light objects – are deliberately displayed without plinths, horizontally, on the ground we all share. From the outside, Casa Dentro looks like the communal garden shared by tenants in the middle of an apartment block. In Italy, we call it “corte”, and it is a space that was once used for meetings, discussions, parties, and dinners, but is now very much neglected. As the anthropologist Andrea Staid points out in many of his works, we are in fact becoming increasingly afraid of contact in our buildings, and houses are being lived more like cages than porous spaces. This is something that, according to anthropology, began with the Industrial Revolution–the movement that brought people from rural areas to the cities to work in big industries–and with this exhibition, Formafantasma addresses this very moment from the point of view of architecture and design.
How did modernist design influence the idea of the house that we still carry with us today? In a nutshell, the modernist movement emerged at the beginning of the 20th century with architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, profoundly changing urban design around the world. One of its main principles was to get rid of anything that felt heartfelt, decorative, personal–sometimes even kitsch–inside and outside the home. Democratising principles were to some extent misunderstood in this architecture. In particular, horizontality was confused with homologation between house types that once had their regional character. The point is that this local character was not only important in aesthetic terms but also had positive environmental and social implications. From an environmental point of view, it meant designing houses in a local way, using local materials, following the specific weather conditions of the area, and reusing materials found around the house with a pioneering attitude of durability. It also meant that a house was never completely finished, always open to change according to the needs of the community and the family: something very different from the walls we can’t even touch in our rented houses. Most importantly, it meant that a home was much more than a physical space: it was a layering of meanings and memories that belonged to almost everyone who entered it.
That’s why, in the limited edition pieces presented at ICA, form is quite literally a phantom, and the ghosts in the room are these memories, gestures, patterns and materials coming from our neglected childhoods far from the standardised metropolis. The pieces of furniture, ranging from seats to small dinner tables, have a handmade dimension in common: a flower is painted on a neglected corner of the wood, recalling the doodles that children make when they first encounter the objects in their home. A green chair, majestically Neapolitan, blends curved metal tubing–a staple of modernist design–with elements of embroidery, one of the practices considered most distinctly feminine. It evokes the presence of a strong old lady with her broom, standing still in a now empty house, waiting for something to happen, while the world around her moves on: the phantom that no one wants to become, the idea of ourselves that we left behind when we left our home towns, but that we sometimes feel the need to recall along the way.
If masculinity has been the cultural extension of rationality, and therefore modernism is the physical extension of masculinity, perhaps there are some rooms, like the one of our old lady, that have resisted modernity. Perhaps the resurfacing memories of the layered, unfounded and embellished houses of our childhood could act as an act of resistance to the toxic and dangerous dogmas that have developed around the idea of living. After all, ghosts in order to be awakened, need spirits to come and take care of them, and we have already taken too much care of the modernist legacy. Perhaps it is time to evoke new ghosts, but that doesn’t mean that it would be any less uncanny.
There is a story that has become quite popular on the internet, and it actually originated from a creepy pasta, which are horror stories of dubious origin that are often spread by users on Reddit. It tells the story of a man who has been living the American dream, the perfect life in the perfect house, and who at some point realises that the lamp under the television that he always sees when he sits on the couch actually seems to change colour and shape every day. In the online story, the man is in a coma, trapped in the beautiful life he imagined for himself, and the table lamp is the glitch that keeps the memory of the outworld alive. However, in this case, that memory is something to be escaped from.
This process is called estrangement: coming home from a long day and noticing that something is different, that something is not quite right, but you can’t really remember what’s changed. And this is something that often happens when you return to your childhood home: everything is the same, but nothing is quite the same. Maybe your mother has thrown away some of your things, maybe the silk covering the chairs is yellowing, maybe the carpet has moved a few centimeters, maybe the everyday smell of the house has aged along with your parents. Perhaps it is this feeling that makes the designs presented by Formafantasma so unique. They are not just a reminder of beautiful and lost memories, but carry the eerie qualities of growing up and growing apart.
